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Three Scenarios For Funding Interstellar Travel

Mankind’s only chance for survival in the coming millennium is to spread out into space. So argues British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and a score of other eminent physicists, rocket scientists and intellectuals in Starship Century, a collection of essays and science fiction edited by brothers James and Gregory Benford.

Hawking’s argument, laid out in an essay titled, “Our Only Chance,” is all too familiar. “Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill,” he writes. “But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were our survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next one hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.”

For these futurists, doomsday scenarios abound—from environmental disasters to overpopulation and the use of nuclear weapons. But the essays are not all doom and gloom. According to contributors like Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees and Geoffrey Landis, the science that has brought us to the brink of destruction may also hold the seeds of salvation. Figuring out how to build a spaceship that can survive centuries-long interstellar voyages could also help us understand how to survive on earth, the mother of all starships, if the environment becomes hostile to life as we know it.

But efforts to put new theories into practice by building and testing space vehicles could quickly add up to trillions of dollars. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and co-founder of the Mars Society, estimates in his essay that it could cost $125 trillion to build a ship capable of traveling 10 percent of the speed of light and supporting a few score human voyagers. To put that sum in perspective, the entire Apollo program cost about $120 billion in today’s dollars or 1 percent of the planet’s GDP in 1968. An equivalent sum today would be around $841 billion, leaving a funding gap of more than $124 trillion, assuming Zubrin’s estimate is in the ball park.

Should we conclude that interstellar travel is out of reach based on cost alone? Futurist Peter Schwartz, one of the pioneers of scenario planning, said not necessarily. In a September seminar for the Long Now Foundation and an essay in Starship Century, Schwartz lays out scenarios by which funding could materialize for interstellar travel. Here are three of the biggies.

1. Nation states respond to crisis. Things get so bad on earth that governments of major nations are spurred into action. Coalitions of wealthy nations pool their resources and launch starships headed toward habitable planets. This scenario works with sleepships, where human beings travel in stasis, or generation ships, where human beings live out entire generations as they slowly make their way across the galaxy.

2. World religions take the lead. Overpopulation is accompanied by a growth in organized religion. Cities have been replaced by arcologies, huge, self-sustaining habitats. Meanwhile, we have finally encountered signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The largest religions compete to launch interstellar missionary projects.

3. Trillionaires and their toys. A shrinking population controls an enormously wealthy planet. It’s an age of quantum computing, fusion reactors, synthetic biology and highly efficient solar power.

SpaceX Falcon-9 Heavy (Photo credit: FlyingSinger)

Average global growth of 5 percent has led to a doubling of wealth every 15 years while breakthroughs in life extension lead to people living beyond 150 years. By 2200, the world is a thousand times wealthier than it is today and has half as many people. Just as today’s hyper-wealthy turn their attention to both life extension and space projects, so do tomorrow’s trillionaires.

When talking about scenarios for funding interstellar travel, it’s hard to escape science fiction. Still, as Schwartz reminded a sold-out audience at the SFJazz Center, no one would have imagined ten years ago the predominant roles that business magnates like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are playing in the space program today. The “billionaires” scenario is already beginning to play out on earth today. “It’s not implausible that over the next couple of hundred years billions would become trillions,” Schwartz said.

“I put these together, but there are many scenarios here, with different motivations, different forms of propulsion, different levels of population,” Schwartz said. ” There are many ways of doing this. There is no single right answer.”

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Also a link to Tau Zero’s “Transgalactic Travel Guide” – a diagram showing how fast you need to go to reach interstellar distances over different time scales. The diagram is at and a tutorial to explain the diagram is available via links on that page.

This past August, I was honored to have been selected for the role of creative strategy director for Starship Congress, “the first-ever summit of interstellar space scientists and interstellar science organizations.” (My background is in encouraging students to pursue careers in astronautics by fostering interest in space & science.)

Over the course of four days, over 250 attendees at Starship Congress discussed and began the work for guiding an agreed upon plan of action for humankind’s achieving of a genuine interstellar accomplishment. That is, getting a ship or device from our solar system to another solar system. The talks included everything from scientists/author James Benford discussing the opportunity of solar sails; to TED fellow Rachel Armstrong sharing a vision of interstellar “worldships”—featuring living architecture with features that resemble or are likenable to biologic components,; to Armen Papazain’s (who I note has commented here as well) brilliant, award-winning presentation revealing a reexamined world economics model robust enough to enable space commerce and interstellar opportunities.

What makes interstellar-as-an-accomplishment so exciting is not only the grand accomplishment itself—it is the value of the steps leading to the accomplishment. These are transformative steps, steps such as ingenuitive methods of transport, reinvented world economic models, breakthroughs in materials and material production, that do as much for the evolution of humankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of writing.

Consider a magazine article on going to the moon in, say, 1913. So an article in Forbes on interstellar travel in 2013? It’s amazing and prescient. To even the most disinterested reader, this is clearly the direction and the way to where we are going. Excelsior!

Ms. Ackerman, as a presenter at the 2013 DARPA sponsored 100 Year Starship Conference last week, I have to disagree with Peter Schawrtz on how this will be funded.

It is not political or economic will that will lead us to the stars, but technological breakthroughs, as I have documented in the Interstellar Challenge Matrix, the impossible cost of a rocket type propulsion (see http://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/12/gravity-modification-what-is-it)

What is required is a radical rethink of our physical theories, as John C “Buck” Field, one of the other 2013 100 YSS presenters had pointed out that the National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized the need for a radical rethink of physical theories some years ago.

The technological breakthroughs that will come out of this rethink will get us to the stars. The following paper is a first step to this rethink.

I disagree! The real cost of building anything in outer space, be it an orbital habitat or a ship to take us to another star is fundamentally the same. That cost is the cost of establishing a space mining and fabrication system. Once this space mining system is in place, all materials are free.

Using a combination of traditional mining/smelting/fabricating and 3D printer technology, we can build anything in space from raw materials. Everything from Thorium for nuclear fuel to Silicon for electronics can be harvested from asteroids. Those materials are then processed in space and finished products prepared for use.

The basic cost for all this is in the neighborhood of $1B … very attainable. The faster we want this “ship” built the more of these billion dollar systems we need to put into place.

Here is a project founded on this concept that wants to build a space habitat For millions of people: http://www.spacedevcoop.com

There is a fourth option: a global cooperative (which we are currently building)

Our plan is to build an orbital habitat that can house 1 million families. This habitat is designed to be interstellar capable. The cost of this structure is actually far less than most current estimates. By implementing an asteroid mining system, all resources needed for construction are free and thus the only cost is for the mining systems which we have designed and estimate cost at about half a billion each.

Another half billion builds and deploys a robotic assembly force to do the actual construction of the habitat. We have estimated that with 4 mines and 2 robotic forces we could have this habitat/interstellar craft built in 25 years.

We sell memberships to the coop at $15,000 or $50/month for 25 years. This will generate $15B in gross income (more than adequate for our plan). We will also supplement our funds through sale of raw materials in space as well as delivery to Earth of rare earths and other precious metals.